Hi all, I was told to ask here by Zalas. He said you were something of a linguistics buff, and

I'm doing a short presentation on just some basic Japanese linguistics information, and I figuring out the correct syllable template is proving a bit difficult, what with not being a native speaker of Japanese. Not to mention ethnologue claims it's a CV language, when it's clearly not.
So far, I've more or less come to the conclusion that it's a CCVC language, with the the bolded C: CCVC being a glottal stop.

So for example, philosophy would be transcribed as [ta-Ê”kÊ°an]
And "tte" pronounced by itself would be [Ê”tÊ°É›].

In any event, if you're able to point me in the right direction, it'd be greatly appreciated.